Stranger Than Fiction

Veteran travel journalist and author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and 1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die talks about going from frequent flyer to making the most of the imposed time in her NYC apartment — like finally taking down her Christmas tree,  getting tracked down by the American Ambassador to Lithuania, where she’s been wanting to go since she was six years old, the time she spoke at The White House, her soft spot for Italy, and much more.

After Patricia Schultz came on board as Trafalgar’s Global Brand Ambassador, a staff member looked up just how many of the places in her 1,000 Places to See Before You Die book matched up with experiences offered on itineraries by the travel brand.

“It was well over 600, close to 700, so we had a laugh because we realized early on that we were both on the same page as they say and we both shared this love and this understanding of just how valuable and inspiring travel is and how important it is for us and how you should travel as much as you can and as often as you can ,” Schultz tells Travel Courier. “We’re very simpatico and very compatible in that way.”

Before sitting down to write her first book, which took her eight years to finish, Schultz had been part of a team writing different guidebooks.

“This was everything from antiquities to modern art to museums to festivals to waterfalls to national parks and that’s the way I had always travelled so in my head I’d been collecting this volume of places and I was so lucky beyond belief that I had the contract first to do the book,” she recalls. “They gave me carte blanche, they really said just write what you want, which was actually daunting because before I had a quota, if I was writing about hotels I needed this many in this category and this many in this category, but here it was like write whatever you love, write whatever you think causes wow factor, write whatever you think deserves to be in the book so I thought okay, and I went home and I cried.”

Managing editor, Ann Ruppenstein tells the full story in the latest issue of TRAVEL COURIER.